The End of Winter Party: Trying (sometimes futilely) to embrace Calgary's worst season

Tom Babin, Swerve03.22.2013

"As the season died out, this would be a final test, a challenge to myself and those close to me to finally embrace the season, or go down trying. I chose a date in the waning days of winter, put out a call to hibernating neighbours, and started planning a party to celebrate the end of, and cement my newfound love for, winter."Josh Holinaty
/ Swerve

"Like most lifelong Calgarians, I had spent my adult life grumbling about winter, and doing my best to avoid it. I would move from heated home to heated car to heated workplace, complaining the entire time about the cold that I rarely encountered."Josh Holinaty
/ Swerve

“I was out for a brisk walk, in mid-mull, when a passing truck threw a big, sloppy slap of Calgary winter right onto my face. I could even taste it: a savoury blend of mud and slush, with hints of brackish grit. That sealed it. Either winter would have to change, or I would."Josh Holinaty
/ Swerve

"I dragged my kids outside. We built a snowman, and pulled the old toboggan from the rafters of the garage. I recalled my junior-high outdoor-education class and taught them to build a quinzhee (don’t call it an igloo), which brought a gaggle of neighbourhood kids swish-swish-swishing in their snowpants to play. They, of course, loved it. Kids like snow. On that day, I liked it too."Josh Holinaty
/ Swerve

The moment that did it for me, the image that really got under my skin, was when I saw a fat, middle-aged Finn easing himself and his tiny Speedo into the icy waters of the Oulu River as it flowed toward the Baltic Sea. He floated around like a beluga for a few moments, then emerged, steam billowing off his imperious belly, and walked up the metal gangway in bare feet toward the change room. When he saw a gaggle of tourists gawking at him, incredulous that anybody would, in the weak light of a near-Arctic winter morning, go for a swim, he slowed to a strut as his moustache froze and his skin reddened. This, I thought, was a dude on good terms with winter.

That’s what I had come for. Here in northern Finland, only 100 kilometres from the Arctic Circle, I was seeking a better relationship with the season we all hate. Like most lifelong Calgarians, I had spent my adult life grumbling about winter, and doing my best to avoid it. I would move from heated home to heated car to heated workplace, complaining the entire time about the cold that I rarely encountered. But a few years ago, housebound and stir-crazy with young children, I realized avoidance was failing. So I started mulling over a change in attitude. That’s when the splatter hit. I was out for a brisk walk, in mid-mull, when a passing truck threw a big, sloppy slap of Calgary winter right onto my face. I could even taste it: a savoury blend of mud and slush, with hints of brackish grit. That sealed it. Either winter would have to change, or I would.

What followed was an ongoing odyssey, full of ups and downs, in search of contentment with our horrible season. I’d like to say this story has a happy ending. I was planning it that way, with a big climactic moment that would enable me to make peace with Old Man Winter, while pointing the way to a happier, healthier future. But things didn’t work out that way. Reality was much more complicated. And so, as I was soon to decide, was living with winter in Calgary.

“Most of the adults I know . . . hate winter,” wrote Pierre Berton in his aptly titled book Winter. For the guy who defined the now-outdated notion of what it meant to be Canadian—hardy, fond of plaid, in touch with the freezing season—that must have been a painful paragraph to write in the twilight of his life. Berton grew up in the Yukon, the son of a Klondike stampeder, so winter was an inescapable part of his upbringing. The book is a love letter to snow and ice, but by 1994 when it was published, his sentiments already had a certain wistfulness to them.

Before Berton’s time, Canadians defined themselves as winter people. In the late 1800s, wealthy Montrealers would pose for photographs in their best furs. Snowshoeing clubs were bastions of the ruling class (snubbing, of course, the First Nations people who invented the things). In Banff, early photographs are flush with frolicking ice skaters and rugged Swiss expats calf-deep in the snow. In the late 1800s, winter carnivals in Eastern Canada were talked about around the world. In Montreal in 1885, architect A.C. Hutchison, fresh off building Canada’s Parliament buildings, constructed a carnival ice castle 100 feet high, which was written about by the New York Times. But the end came quickly. William van Horne, the railway magnate whose statue points the way west outside of the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, was among those who thought images of winter were ruining Canada’s tourism industry. “Ice palaces, Indians and Dog Trains,” he wrote, “are not popular features in our foreign advertising.”

Since then, our infatuation with winter has been slowly melting. Every technological and cultural change seems to drive a wedge between the dark season and our national psyche. Central heating, anti-lock brakes, all-inclusive Mexican resorts, Snuggies—all have contributed to a profound change in our attitudes toward winter.

In Calgary, things are even tougher. Our downtown Plus-15 system, beloved by office workers and despised by urbanists, makes avoiding winter easy. Our schizophrenic weather doesn’t help either. Most of us, despite our revulsion of cold, can appreciate the beauty of a fresh snowfall or the way hoar frost makes the morning twinkle. What’s more common for Calgarians, however, is waking to filthy vehicles, garbage-bag trees and dirty snow banks locked in with gravel. Calgary has more freeze-thaws than Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.

At the end of February, the Weather Network launched a new regional broadcast in Calgary because, as Kelsey McEwen, the network’s new local weather specialist, told the Herald, in classic understatement: “Alberta really is notoriously difficult to forecast.” That means joggers in shorts clogging the pathways on one Saturday, and balaclavas the next. How can you feel good about an unpredictable season when you host the Olympics and everything melts? How can you plan a season of outdoor hockey, snowmen and tobogganing with a mean daily temperature this past January of -1.5 C (that’s barely tuque weather) and 3.4 centimetres of snow for the entire month (not enough to reach your ankle). And that’s not even factoring in climate change.

These were the dreary thoughts I battled in the early days of my mission to embrace winter. So with the next snowfall, I decided to give my fresh approach a test. I dragged my kids outside. We built a snowman, and pulled the old toboggan from the rafters of the garage. I recalled my junior-high outdoor-education class and taught them to build a quinzhee (don’t call it an igloo), which brought a gaggle of neighbourhood kids swish-swish-swishing in their snowpants to play. They, of course, loved it. Kids like snow. On that day, I liked it too.

I started seeking out the zealots and oddballs who claimed to enjoy winter, and quickly found that most of them are skiers or snowboarders. After a decade away from the slopes, a family ski trip was in order. I had forgotten how skiing can change your perspective on snow and cold, especially after four après-ski beverages in the hot tub. Later, we headed out to the village of Lake Louise for its winter festival, and spent hours wandering around the ice-carving competition with hot chocolate in hand, under a brilliant winter sun.

My new attitude seemed to be working. But those Rocky Mountain winter highs melted away each time I rounded Lac Des Arcs on the Trans-Canada Highway and hit the Morley Flats, where the horizon opens up and fields of brown stretch as far as you can see. By the time I was home, I was back into the full-scale, bald-ass prairie winter blues.

I needed to take it up a notch. I needed a place that had the winter of my mind. So when an opportunity arose for a work-project research trip to northern Finland, my interest was piqued. While not your typical tourist stop in mid-February, the region’s tourism brochure seemed to be printed for me. Cross-country skiing. Nordic skating. Reindeer races. Reindeer races! I couldn’t resist.

That’s what took me to my next stop. A place, but also a state of mind, Oulu, Finland is a fishing village cum university town of 200,000 sitting at a latitude farther north than Iqaluit. Thanks to the warming Gulf Stream, the climate is relatively mild and for the few days in February I spent there, the temperature hovered around

-5 C, under a colourful sub-Arctic twilight that stayed late and returned early. City plows left a packed layer of white on the roads, and a fresh dusting of powder every day I was there created the lovely winter wonderland I was seeking. But it wasn’t just the weather. The people seemed different. Pedestrians and joggers were everywhere. Grannies rode their bikes on snow-packed paths to pick up groceries. Fat guys in tiny bathing suits went for daily dips in the freezing river.

It was an eye-opening experience, but it only complicated matters for me. Scandinavians are more active than typical North Americans, as we constantly hear from those trying to guilt us into exercising more, but what makes them approach winter so differently? When I asked, most Finns shrugged, put their walking poles aside and answered with some version of “What are you gonna do?” I found that response unsatisfyingly practical. A few confessed to enjoying “four seasons,” which struck me as something you say when you’re trying to convince yourself. Several times, I heard the same platitude: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” That smugness made me want to punch people. Nearly everyone was confused about why a Canadian would ask such questions. “Did you just move there?” one person asked earnestly. Not exactly, I

replied sheepishly, a third-generation Calgarian.

While I was souvenir-hunting in the airport on my way home, I picked up a copy of the Finnish comic strip Moomin, a perpetually popular character that would be a kind of Finnish Mickey Mouse if Mickey were a lumpy creature of uncertain origin. In one of the stories, Moomin in Winter, an insufferable jock forces Moomin and friends to stop hibernating and enjoy some winter sports. The results are not good, until the story’s denouement, when everyone comes together for a winter party.

On the flight home, somewhere over Iceland, as I drifted in and out of a shallow airplane sleep, that vision of a Moomin winter party seeped into my mind (my party had screaming Iranians, but that was probably because Argo was playing on the seatback TV). The idea seemed perfect. As the season died out, this would be a final test, a challenge to myself and those close to me to finally embrace the season, or go down trying. I chose a date in the waning days of winter, put out a call to hibernating neighbours, and started planning a party to celebrate the end of, and cement my newfound love for, winter.

In the days leading up to the party, I had a vision: I pictured strings of white lights illuminating freshly fallen snow, while smiling groups of friends gathered in furry boots and sweaters embroidered with evergreen trees. I imagined children sizzling hot dogs over roaring fires while their parents stayed warm with laughter and Irish cream. But as I pulled the patio furniture from storage, a different reality had set it. It hadn’t snowed in weeks. A Chinook blew in, leaving the lawn brown and squishy. As I strung lights in skeleton trees, the only white remaining was an immovable chunk of dirty ice secured to the spot where I wanted to place the portable fire pit. I chopped out a spot for the legs and shoved it into place. We planned an ice-carving competition for the neighbourhood kids, but it was so warm we had to chill the blocks in the neighbour’s deep freezer. On the morning of the party, as the temperature hit 10 C, my vision slowly melted away.

Partygoers, however, came in droves, with ski jackets and smiles. Nobody seemed to care. The kids played a game of street curling with hunks of ice, and my wife mixed vat after vat of hot chocolate to keep up with demand. Soon, I stopped apologizing for the weather because everyone seemed oblivious to my kvetching, and I started enjoying myself. As the evening darkened, and the schnapps made itself at home in my stomach, maybe the lights did start to dance a bit. The air cooled, and we huddled around the fire, eating chili-dogs and sharing laughs.

Maybe, I thought, I was making too much of the weather. Maybe winter is more than temperature. Sure, my vision became a victim of Calgary’s capricious wind patterns, but as I said goodbye to the last partygoer, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

We awoke the next morning to a thick, welcoming blanket of dazzling, sparkling, beautiful snow. Just in time for spring.

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The End of Winter Party: Trying (sometimes futilely) to embrace Calgary's worst season

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